Inclusive Education and Critical Pedagogy at the Intersections of Disability, Race, Gender and Class

Inclusive education and critical pedagogy at the intersections of disability, race, gender and class Anastasia Liasidou European University, Cyprus Abstract The paper aims to use insights from critical pedagogy to forge and exemplify links with the movement of educational inclusion. The struggles for change, theorised in terms of the emancipatory and liberating potential of schooling, set out the conceptual and analytical backdrop against which issues of exclusion and marginalisation are discussed and reflected upon. The emancipatory and transformative roles of schools, as sites of power interplays at the interstices of disability, race, socioeconomic background and gender, are placed at the core of the analytical framework, with a view to highlighting the contextual and political ways against which notions of “need” and “disadvantage” are constructed, reified and perpetuated in dominant conceptualisations of schooling and pedagogy. It is suggested that the emancipatory potential of schooling entails transcending traditional constructions and arbitrations of the “ideal student”, embodied in Western-centric and neoliberal constructions of pedagogical discourse. The notion of intersectionality, as perceived and exemplified in relation to insights from critical pedagogy and critical disability studies, is presented as an emancipatory theoretical and analytical tool in interrogating and deconstructing educational discourses of individual and social pathology that evoke and legitimize the constitution of the “non-ideal student” in current schooling. Key words: Inclusion, Critical Pedagogy, disability, justice, equality, power. Introduction Currently, educational inclusion constitutes an international policy imperative that promotes the rights of disabled children to be educated alongside their peers in mainstream classrooms (Armstrong and Barton 2007;Kenworthy and Whittaker 2000; Rioux 2002). Even though inclusive education is a relatively recent policy phenomenon, it embodies ideas and arguments that have long been discussed and debated. Inclusive education reflects values and principles and is concerned with challenging the ways in which educational systems reproduce and perpetuate social inequalities with regard to marginalised and excluded groups of students across a range of abilities, characteristics, developmental trajectories, and socioeconomic circumstances. Hence, inclusion is inexorably linked with the principles of equality and social justice in both educational and social domains (Ainscow 1999; Artiles et al 2006; Lipsky & Gartner, 1996; Sapon- Shevin, M. 2003). As Armstrong and Barton (2007:6) write: 168 | P a g e Inclusive education and critical pedagogy at the intersections of disability, race, gender and class For us inclusive education is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. It is about contributing to the realisation of an inclusive society with a demand for a rights approach as a central component of policy-making. Thus the question is fundamentally about issues of human rights, equity, social justice and the struggle for a non-discriminatory society. These principles are at the heart of inclusive educational policy and practice. While there is agreement on the centrality of a social justice discourse in bringing about inclusive education reforms, the notion of social justice is ambiguous and contested (Artiles et al 2006; Hattam et al 2009; Johnson 2008). The lack of definitional consensus has implications for the ways in which social justice can “be realised and implemented in and through schools” (Johnson 2008: 310). Hence, notwithstanding the indisputable moral and ethical standing of an inclusive education reform agenda, there are contradictory views on what constitutes justice and equality of opportunity for disabled students. As a result, segregated placements are occasionally presented as being part of an “inclusion” agenda in terms of learning and participation (Dyson 2005; Warnock 2010) thereby ignoring the cultural politics of disability and special educational needs (Armstrong 2005). Inclusion is this respect, is reduced to a special education artefact that creates and consolidates fixed and essentialist understandings of students’ “disabled identities” (Thomas 1999) without taking into consideration the ways in which these “identities” are created and sustained within current schooling (Graham 2006). A social justice discourse in inclusive education policy and practice necessitates “changing systems that perpetuate racism, power, and exclusion” (Mullen and Jones 2008:331);and it involves questioning the ways in which schools valorize certain student- identities while devaluing others (Harwood & Humphy 2008; Graham, 2005; Youdell, 2006). This perspective, concentrates on transcending deficit oriented and blame-the- victim approaches that “define educational bodies, relationships and structures” (Johnson 2004:151), and ostracize certain students to the margins of social and educational domains. Theoretical pleas for ending the oppression and marginalisation of certain groups of students have been prominently echoed in scholarly work on critical pedagogy (Giroux 1992; McLaren 1998), which has sought to examine the ways in which “an issue relates to ‘deeper’ explanations — deeper in the sense that they refer to the basic functioning of power on institutional and societal levels” (Burbules and Berk 1999:11). The article uses insights from critical pedagogy to exemplify and forge links with a radical human rights approach to inclusive education (Barton and Armstrong 2007) and explore issues of educational equality. A radical human rights approach to inclusive education policy concentrates on redressing inequalities of power and discriminatory practices on the basis of disability, as well as other forms of social disadvantage, and contribute to wider social and political reforms for a socially just and non-discriminatory world (Barton 2003). Despite the fact that the notion of disability has not been explicitly touched upon in critical pedagogy (Gabel 2002; Goodley 2007; Erevelles 2000), insights from critical pedagogy can provide a theoretical platform against which the notion of disability can be problematised, deconstructed and repositioned to probe and exemplify links amongst 169 | P a g e disability, race, class, culture, socioeconomic status and power. Towards this end, the notion of intersectionality is presented as a means to explore the ways in which disability rests upon, is intertwined with, and emanates from, other sources of social disadvantage. Disabled individuals experience what we might call “intersectional subordination”, a term that was first recognised by American feminist analysts in the late 1980s and in the beginning of 1990, to denote the multiple forms of discrimination experienced by African American women and not experienced by African American men or white women in general (Kirk and Okazawa-Rey 2007; Makkonen 2002). Within disability studies, feminist analyses of disability pointed to the multiple forms of oppression experienced by disabled women, and especially women from ethnic minorities who might experience simultaneous discrimination (Barnes and Mercer 2010; Thomas 1999). In terms of the subjectifying role of legislation, feminist legal scholars have used the term “social injury” to reconfigure “once privatized injuries into collectivist raced, sexed, and disabilized domains” (Campbell 2005:114). Hence, current debates on inclusive education should draw on the notion of intersectionality whereby the notion of disability is conceptualised in conjunction with issues of race, socioeconomic background and gender thereby providing alternative analytical lenses to challenge reductionist and neoliberal discourses of inclusive education, and discuss the extent to which educational structures and institutions create/perpetuate inequality. Understanding the intersections of systems of oppression and challenging the multiplicity of factors that disable certain groups of students entail critiquing dominant ideologies, educational policies and institutional arrangements that maintain and perpetuate social and educational injustice. The following sections use insights from critical pedagogy and critical disability studies to problematise and challenge current versions of inclusion that pathologise educational failure. Whilst in the past, analyses of disability were concerned with identifying individual pathology, analysts within critical disability studies have been increasingly concerned with identifying the ways in which social contexts and schools function as sites of justice or injustice (Lingard and Mills 2007). In particular, these analyses have probed the necessity to proceed to a thorough evaluation of both material and socio- cultural conditions that give rise to and exacerbate disabling barriers (Oliver 1990; Shakespeare and Watson 2001) with a view to empowering disabled individuals to “create spaces for new knowledge and forms of action to emerge…” (Barton 2001: 5). In a similar vain, critical pedagogy has been extensively concerned with the interweaving nature of multiple forms of oppression (Barbules and Berk 1999; Freire 1998; McLaren 1998) and concentrated on raising questions about issues of inequality with a view to empowering oppressed groups of students to pursue justice and emancipation. While acknowledging the ways in which the wider societal context can undermine school and community efforts to redress gross inequalities (Bringhouse 2010; Giroux 2011),

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